About a year ago, Microsoft first introduced Office Lens for Windows Phone. The idea behind the app was to enable users to convert any smartphone into a pocket scanner. With Office Lens, users can take pictures of receipts, menus, business cards, whiteboards, sticky notes, and anything that contains important information on any surface and from any angle, then Office Lens will enhance, crop as necessary, and save the capture on OneNote.

The operation is just like if you were using a scanner, with difference that it conveniently save the image to any section you assign in OneNote, you can even convert the image into a Word document for easy editing and the app can also save the image as PDF file.

Before-and-after look at pictures of a receipt and a paper document captured and processed by Office Lens for iPhone.

Office Lens is a free application available at the Apple App Store and Microsoft is offering the following features in this release:

Auto crop, enhancement, and cleanup of the image.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so the text inside of the image can become searchable in OneDrive and OneNote.

Inserts images to OneNote or OneDrive as docx, pptx, jpg, or PDF format, and gives you the option to save, export, and share the image.

Alongside iOS app, Microsoft is releasing a preview of Office Lens for Android phones, which is similar to the iPhone version, but the apps have limited functionalities. Unlike Office Lens for iOS, you’ll need to become a beta tester before you can download the app.

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